Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - April 2006
A hard man is good to beat
The snowdrops are in full flood, the crocuses are fully fledged and the daffodils have started to show their trumpets. March 21 is the Vernal Equinox - it's spring again!
The ducks came back to the pond, and I saw a couple of drakes in dispute over a duck. The rabbits are back, I think they were just scouting out the area, to see if it was a good place to reside. I hope they'll spend the summer here. But there's a fox trots across the lawn sometimes, and that's not good if you're a bunny. Still, the holes in the lawn look like the rabbits are interested.
Two black-and-white cats squared off on the lawn. It was obviously a dispute over territory, they were fluffing up their fur and hissing threats at each other. I don't have a cat, so my garden is anycat's.
We think that we own this place. But actually, we just share this space with several other species, all of who also think they own it.
In the last few weeks, I've seen herds of cats rampaging around the garden. I think the previous cat-owner of this cat-territory has gone, and my garden has become common land for cats. Well, it's nice to see them running around having fun.
You can watch this exciting story on the Valkyrie Gardencams
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
I did the server swap again, because another 900 gigabyte server was filled.
A few of the servers don't come up when I give them power, they need a button press. That's no good for remote power control. So I set up a remote relay to let me do that across the internet, and now I can do that for all the servers.
Memory is down to a remarkably low price, £18.75 for 512 mb. And hard drives are down to £61.50 for the 300 gb drives I use (400s are about twice the price, 500s about three times, so the 300s are the sweet spot on prices).
I've built nine 1U servers, each 1200gb of disk; this is the sort of machine that I put in the cabinet at Watford. Now I'm running them continuously to see if any of them fail.
Nothing new.
Nothing new.
The comments on the spams are mine, of course. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their contact details - go find your own spammers!
By the way, if you're using StoneColdMail
(which is free to web site members) then you won't see most of these spams, they'll be delivered
into your "Spam" folder.
Important message from Randy Weaver
Unimportant message from Randy Weaver
Most of the sponsorships now are by giving women server space and bandwidth, so they can operate their web sites without having to pay these fees. There's also photoshoots, which gets some revenue into their hands, as well as the traditional direct-funding sponsorship.
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
You can give a Diana the Valkyrie membership as a gift.
Sign up here for the gift that lasts and lasts. Perfect for an Easter gift!
Member | Posts |
| madman3579 | 3353 |
| TomNine | 2656 |
| mac999 | 1370 |
| Jerroll | 1296 |
| boomerflex | 1294 |
| Terry | 1263 |
| rainer0000 | 1232 |
| heather.pedigo | 1057 |
| zig563 | 1053 |
| buffy18976 | 937 |
| shad349 | 902 |
| gaily304 | 850 |
| mit19237 | 672 |
| steve5924 | 483 |
| drop112 | 455 |
| rjc1965 | 375 |
| bro007 | 292 |
| hiram2000 | 283 |
| 59140 | 242 |
| GrappleJack | 222 |
Madman has elbowed Tom into second place.
There's been a major discussion on my board, about the message board software. Once again, we're talking about the idea of changing to a different software package, possibly to YaBB (that's the package I put on Herbiceps and other sites). But I've also been changing the existing software to accomodate many of the things that people say they want.
Look here to see a new style of board, with threads, and multiple posts on the same page, and the ability to handle as many inline links as you want to have. The old style of viewing the boards will still be available when that version of the software starts to be used.
2619 posts this month.
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| The sporties have gone bananas. | The usual suspects are top of the list |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
Most listed Board of the month | Most read Board of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| It's still about FBBs, but Lift and Carry has become very popular. | A similar picture |
Could the spaghetti harvest be affected by global warming?
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of March 2006, there were about 888,000 pictures (69 gigabytes), 174 gigabytes of video, 10,200 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 242 gigabytes. There's about 175 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.